“CATCHA?” she asked. “Is that the guy who gets balls from the pitcha?”
Cab smiled as he held the passenger door open so that she could climb inside. He was elegantly polite. “Actually, my colleagues on the police gave me a nickname that followed me for a while. Catch-a-Cab. I moved around a lot. Never stayed in one place for more than a year or two.”
“You’ve been in Florida for a while, haven’t you?”
“Yes, I guess I’ve settled down. Hence the license plate. I try to embrace the worst things people say about me. And it’s not like I can complain about nicknames, because I’m notorious for coming up with them myself.”
“You give people nicknames?” Maggie asked.
“I know; it’s not my most appealing trait. I get it from my mother. She referred to Lala Mosqueda as Wawa from the moment we started dating. She knew that it drove Lala crazy.”
“I’m known for handing out nicknames, too,” Maggie admitted, thinking of the Gherkin.
“Well, I guess you’re like my twin, Sergeant.”
“Call me Maggie,” she said.
They drove north. Cab took the I-75 on his way to Clearwater, where his mother lived. It was almost a three-hour drive, but at the speed Cab drove, she figured they would be there in barely over two. She’d always considered herself a fast driver, but Cab left her in the dust.
“So you and Detective Mosquito are an item?” she asked on the highway.
“Off and on. At the moment, off.”
“I just got out of a relationship, too.”
“Well, I’ve never been known for my stable romantic attachments,” Cab said. “That’s another thing I have in common with my mother.”
“I was accused of murdering my husband,” Maggie said. “Can you top that?”
“Did you actually kill him?” he asked.
“I thought about it, but no.”
“Then I can top that,” Cab told her. “I shot and killed my girlfriend in Spain. Turns out she was a terrorist.”
Maggie’s head swiveled to see if he was joking. He wasn’t. “Wow.”
“I spent a lot of years running away from that, but I’m done running.”
Maggie was quiet for the next few miles. She found it disorienting to be speeding along the Florida freeway with this charming and handsome man while the rest of her life was buried in snow 2,000 miles away. It felt like a vacation from reality. She also felt a glimmer, just a glimmer, of what it might be like to be part of a world away from Duluth. That was something she had never considered before.
She and Cab talked easily along the way. She liked him the way someone from the desert finds the mountains foreign and irresistible. He told her stories, and she did the same. She even went so far as to explain her star-crossed crush on Stride and how that particular fever had broken after their short-lived affair. He told her about the case on which he’d met Peach Piper, and it was obvious that he’d thought about the girl as a younger sister.
North of Sarasota, they headed onto the Sunshine Skyway Bridge across Tampa Bay. The blue water seemed endless, sparkling under the bright sun. The high span of the bridge was unsettling even for Maggie, who typically didn’t worry about heights. Cab didn’t seem bothered by it at all. He weaved in and out of the lanes without slowing down. The barrier between them and the drop to the water whipped by only inches away.
“So Tarla Bolton is your mother?” Maggie asked, peering nervously over the side. “You’re a Hollywood baby?”
“Yes. Have you seen any of her movies?”
“If I see one movie a year, that’s a lot, but it seems to me I caught one of her films on TNT a while back. An oldie. I think it was called Society of One.”
Cab didn’t take his eyes off the road. “That was her breakout role. She won a Golden Globe. I was only about six years old then, but I remember a lot of parties.”
“If I recall correctly, Dean Casperson was in that movie, too,” Maggie said.
“You recall correctly.”
He didn’t say anything more.
The traffic on the St. Petersburg side of the bridge slowed them down, but they reached Clearwater less than an hour later. Cab navigated them into the underground parking lot of a high-rise condominium building steps from the beach. They took the elevator up. Tarla Bolton lived on a high floor.
As they watched the numbers climb, Cab said, “I should probably warn you about my mother. She isn’t subtle.”
“In what way?”
“Pretty much every way,” Cab said.
When Tarla answered the door, Maggie realized that he was right. She’d obviously just come from the pool. Her golden blond hair was damp. She wore a low-cut blue-and-white dress that left nothing to the imagination. Maggie would have given a kidney for the prospect of a body like that in her midfifties. Tarla pulled her son into a fierce hug.
“Darling, I’m so glad you came to see me. I was devastated to get your call and hear about Peach. That poor, sweet girl. How are you? Are you okay?”
“Not really,” Cab admitted.
“No, of course you’re not. This is unbelievable. Would you like a drink? Let me get you a drink.”
“A drink can wait. Mother, this is the detective I mentioned. Sergeant Maggie Bei from Duluth, Minnesota.”
Tarla looked Maggie up and down with a sharp eye. She crossed her arms over her surgically enhanced breasts and cocked her head. “Minnesota? I thought there was nothing but Swedes eating lutefisk up there.”
“We do have a lot of those,” Maggie said.
“You look like you have money, dear. Do you have money?”
“Yes.”
“Money is a wonderful thing. It may not buy you love, but it will buy you plenty of sex, which is just as good. I don’t see any ring on that tiny finger of yours, so I assume you’ve already discovered that.”
Maggie blinked and had no idea what to say.
“Mother,” Cab said in a pained voice.
Tarla laughed in a throaty, erotic way. She squeezed Maggie’s shoulder. “Don’t mind me, Sergeant. It’s my life’s mission to embarrass Cab whenever he visits me.”
“And you succeed,” Cab replied.
“Oh, look at you, all conservative. I’m afraid Wawa converted you to Catholicism without your telling me. Or worse, turned you into a Rubio voter.”
Cab glanced at Maggie and discreetly rolled his eyes. Maggie found it hard not to smile, because she’d never seen a mother-son relationship quite like this one. She followed Tarla and Cab into the living room of the condo, where floor-to-ceiling windows made up the wall overlooking the Gulf and the blue sky. The view looked straight down twenty stories to the beach. The furniture was as white as the sand. She saw a glass sculpture that was probably a Chihuly. The paintings on the walls were mostly squiggles and lines.
“Sit, sit, sit,” Tarla ordered them. “Are you sure about that drink? Maggie, what about you?”
“No, thank you.”
Maggie and Cab took the leather sofa. Tarla sat in a glider chair, and she rocked back and forth repeatedly, and her fingers had a little twitch about them. Maggie realized that this millionaire actress was actually nervous, and most of her repartee was a way of covering it up. She wondered what could get under the skin of someone who’d conquered one of the toughest businesses in the world, and she knew the answer without Tarla saying a word.
Dean Casperson.
Tarla didn’t waste any time getting to the point. Her voice was sober now. Her nails tapped the table next to the Chihuly. “So, Peach. Was it him? Did he do it?”
“Yes,” Cab said.
Maggie leaned forward. “We believe we know the man who was responsible for Peach’s murder, but it’s likely he was a paid assassin. We have no evidence yet about who hired him.”
“But Dean’s in town?” Tarla asked. “He’s filming there?”
Maggie nodded.
“Then Cab is right,” Tarla said. “It was him.”